Author Meghan Lamb‘s new novel, Silk Flowers (Birds of Lace, March 2017), is a book that cuts to the core of disturbance. In it, a woman is struck by an inexplicable and undiagnosable illness that renders her immobile and takes away her ability to speak.

In a political climate in which undocumented immigrants are painted as criminals and rapists and half the country is crying for deportation, this week’s story reminds us that immigrants are fathers who love their daughters, who work hard and send money home to dying mothers, who will go to the ends of the Earth for their loved ones—they are normal Americans with normal hearts, just like the rest of us.

So familiar have the aesthetic conventions of horror become that it is increasingly difficult to distinguish “real” Halloween movies from parodies. Something similar has occurred in our political life.

At the New York Review of Books, Christopher Benfey shares a brief history of collisions between humor and horror in Western literature (and American politics).

Happy day after Halloween! For the New York Times, Terrence Rafferty reviews a variety of chilling fiction, and delves deep into why these are exceptional:

The short story is the ideal form for horror because it can convey a quick, vivid impression of fear, without having to extend the action past the breaking point of the reader’s credulity… For longer works like “The Graveyard Apartment,” there’s really only one basic plot available: A person (or a group of people) struggles to escape an impossible situation.

In honor of Halloween, Consequence of Sound has collected what they deem the “10 Essential Horror Movie Scores.” Following Scorsese’s argument that music and film are intrinsically tied, “[b]ecause there’s a kind of intrinsic musicality to the way moving images work when they’re put together,” the piece celebrates how horror perhaps above all genres uses music to generate the cringing effect of its best scenes.

“Utopian Façade” is a track from the director’s second studio album, Lost Themes II, and the video, directed by Gavin Hignight and Ben Verhulst, is a kind of Neon Genesis Evangelion meets zombie forest freakout set to the hum of Carpenter’s darkly suspenseful composing.

The horror master has formed a band (including his son and godson), and is embarking on a world tour to perform his own reworked versions of the soundtracks to Halloween, Escape From New York, Assault on Precinct 13, and The Fog, Consequence of Sound reports.

Genevieve Valentine explores the performance of toxic masculinity for Strange Horizons. Valentine uses the horror movie The Guest to deconstruct both the camp and the too-real danger of toxic masculinity:

The film’s most suspense-generating disconnect is between the degree to which toxic masculinity viewed from afar is hilarious, and the degree to which toxic masculinity viewed close up will literally kill you.

It’s that time of year when everyone is dying for a good scary story, a tale with thrills and chills, one to make you check over your shoulder around the campfire. But what makes a story truly scary? Is it blood and gore, or psychological suspense?

In his video for the song “Submarine” by the french synth-duo The Shoes, director Karim Huu Do takes the eeriness latent in the song to a fully horrific place of faces with no orifices, ominous swimming pools, and pulsing tumor clouds.

If you loved Choose Your Own Adventure stories as a kid and still wonder where all that branching narrative magic went, you might want to check out ADJUNCT by Ishmael Gilgamesh, in which you are a writer (of some kind) who may (or may not) become an adjunct to pay the bills.

Kill Bill is revolutionary because it disrupts both content and genre, beautifully showcasing what these superhero-action stories so consistently overlook, while embodying the success of what the genre could achieve....more

Scary movie of the hour It Follows is peppered with intertextual references to Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot. Ben Apatoff looks for the connection (if there is one):

If anything, The Idiot enhances It Follows more than it represents it, augmenting the film’s foreboding atmosphere with quotes from a writer who could create anxiety and suspense as artfully as any of the Russian greats.

Carrie is most definitely of the horror genre, and horror is never about being comfortable. Society has changed, but what’s at the core of King’s novel remains as raw and powerful as it was four decades ago: Peer pressure, cliques, ruthless bullying, and being an outsider.

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